A Ghostly Trio from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope

Scientists release images of a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

In the spirit of Halloween, scientists are releasing a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. All three spooky structures, called planetary nebulas, are, in fact, material ejected from dying stars. As death beckoned, the stars’ wispy bits and pieces were blown into outer space.

“Some might call the images haunting,” said Joseph Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, principal investigator of the Spitzer observing program. “We look to the pictures for a sense of the history of the stars’ mass loss, and to learn how they evolved over time.”

All stars about the mass of the sun will die similarly ethereal deaths. As sun-like stars grow old, billions of years after their inception, they run out of fuel in their cores and puff up into red, giant stars, aptly named “red giants.” The stars eventually cast off their outer layers, which expand away from the star. When ultraviolet light from the core of a dying star energizes the ejected layers, the billowy material glows, bringing their beautiful shapes to light. They come in an array of shapes, as illustrated by the three highlighted here in infrared images from Spitzer. The ghostly material will linger for only a few thousand years before ultimately fading into the dark night.

Above, from left: the Exposed Cranium Nebula is located roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Vela constellation; the Ghost of Jupiter Nebula is roughly 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Hydra; and the Little Dumbbell Nebula is about 2,500 light-years from Earth in the Perseus constellation.

For more on what makes up these nebulas, see the NASA press release.